WIRR 2018, October Week 2

Old Town Square is about a block from my office. It’s filled with interesting stuff to photograph, but only on days when I bring my macro lens. I need the large aperture of that lens to blur out the background, because otherwise there are too many distracting elements in the background. On this particular day in October, the skies were overcast with a light drizzle thrown in for good measure. A relatively new feature in Old Town Square is a set of painted Adirondack chairs. This one caught my eye, and it became my favorite image of the week.

The chair was painted by Hannah Circenis, an artist here in Fort Collins. Check her out on Instagram or at her website.

Digital Darkroom. I made some interested edits to this one. I started with some global changes, including boosts to contrast, clarity, and some dehaze. I lowered highlights a lot. In the original picture, the blue picnic tables in the background really competed with the chair’s color. To fix that, I created a brush and used that to lower saturation (-63!). At the top of the picture, I set the brush to full power. As I worked my way down the photo, I painted successive bands with flow set to 80, then 60, 40, and down to 20. I’m still experimenting with changing the flow setting, but what it let me do here is blend in the desaturation so that there was no abrupt transition. I finished the image with one more brush, this one on the surface of the chair to further amp the color saturation of the paint.

WIRR stands for Weekly Image Rich Ruh. This regular feature on Das Has von Ruh will show and describe my favorite photo created during this weekly period. My weeks start on Mondays, as does the WIRR. I’m hoping to include commentary on the story, the setting, the specs, or the sentiments, depending on the circumstances.